Patch 7.2 - Drape of Shame NerfDrape of Shame will have the effect halved in Patch 7.2.

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

We've been talking about this one quite a lot. Having a significantly out-of-band item existing on live is always a dilemma. We either nerf it and deflate the players who had the excitement of getting it (or even worse, actively invested a lot of time and effort into getting it), or leave it in place potentially distorting future behavior. And the longer we wait, the worse it gets. So deciding usually relies on the judgment of whether the situation will taper off if we leave it alone (due to higher-level items eventually becoming available), or will get worse somehow.

In the case of Drape of Shame, the base Mythic version would potentially have been acceptable to leave alone once it was live. But the imminent arrival of Mythic Keystone Karazhan was a clear way that this particular problem would rise to a new level if we left it alone. So it was better to make a change now, even at the risk of disappointing some players who have it (they have still gotten to enjoy it for some time throughout the current tier), to avoid re-creating the same problem anew in the next tier.

North American Qualifier Cup Clarification

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

We’re still working out the final details needed for the official announcement of the first North American Qualifier Cup, but there’s an important clarification we wanted to share with you now.

The bracket seeding for this first cup will be determined by your end of season rating for Legion PvP Season 2. Remember that there is no rating requirement to sign up, so regardless of the rating your team achieves overall, all teams will still be eligible to compete in the Cup.

Stay tuned for more information - we’ll see you in the Arena!

Live Developer Q&A – Submit Your Questions

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Join us live on Twitch.tv/Warcraft Thursday, March 23, at 11:00 a.m. PDT, as we sit down with Game Designer Ryan Shwayder for our next live developer Q&A where he’ll be answering your patch 7.2 content related questions. Learn more before you return to the Broken Shore!

You can submit your questions here in this thread or on Twitter by using the hashtag #LegionQA.

As a reminder, please keep your questions short (40 words or less) so that we can get to as many questions as possible. We look forward to you joining us live on Thursday!

Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Tank Balance in the Nighthold
The situation around Nighthold, tank balance, and magical damage has spawned a lot of discussion for us in recent weeks, ranging from immediate balance concerns to philosophical issues of how magic damage should be used. We do feel that the damage profile in Nighthold caused tanks to be less balanced than we'd like on a handful of encounters.

Abilities like Spell Reflection and Empower Wards are no worse than Mark of Ursol, when fighting a boss that does an occasional large magic attack that threatens to cause a killing spike. In fact, Mark of Ursol is usually weaker, because you trade one activation of Ironfur for it, whereas there's no similar downside to activating Empower Wards. The time this situation is flipped on its head is an encounter like Krosus, who somewhat rarely does a white autoattack but stacks a heavy consistent magical DoT. In this scenario, Mark of Ursol is essentially a free no-cooldown anti-magic "cooldown", and we see this as the largest cause of the current behavior of Guardians in Nighthold.

For the long run, a lot of the feedback on this forum has correctly identified some of the challenges and tradeoffs in how this should be addressed. We do want tanks to have variance in how well they handle different situations, but we also want interesting encounters like Krosus and Etraeus that challenge them on unusual axes, all while not making it feel overly bad for a raid group attempting something with the "wrong" tank. That's something we're going to continue to revise for future tiers of content, but of course that more philosophical discussion won't affect Nighthold.

For the short term, we are not adjusting Guardians in the 7.2 patch because 1) we avoid imposing significant nerfs at this point in a tier to a spec that many people have gotten comfortable completing the content with, and 2) the solution is likely not just a numbers change, but more fundamentally rethinking Mark of Ursol. With that context, the buffs to Protection and Vengeance aren't intended to bring them up to the level of current Guardian, but are intentionally small adjustments to help people who are trying to finish Nighthold now.

As people's focus turns more to Tomb in upcoming months, we welcome any discussion about to what extent people see similar problems arising there, and whether further class changes (beyond reexamining Mark of Ursol) are warranted for long-term balance outside of the specific context of Nighthold.

Something I wasn't clear enough about above: re-evaluating Mark of Ursol would still be before Tomb of Sargeras. Other broad class tuning based on PTR testing and other data closer to that point would also take place as usual, at the start of the new raid. But that's one concrete item we can already mention. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Monk (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)Windwalker Scaling and Weapon DPS
It is an astute observation that Windwalker has very little scaling with its weapon DPS. It's not something we have a short-term fix for, and we recognize the problem relating to relic choice. Longer-term, it's probably best for us to reevaluate the difference between weapondamage-based attacks and AP-based attacks entirely, and what purpose it serves.

To be clear, being focused mostly on AP-based attacks doesn't impair your overall scaling with ilvl--your AP still increases in the correct proportion as you upgrade all of your items. It just means that weapons make up less of the pie (and armor fills up more of it) for Windwalker compared to other specs. It would be nicer to clean this all up so that weapons were consistently important on all specs, and so that we didn't run into things like the relic choice issue. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Paladin (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)Holy Paladin PlaystyleSomething that I've thought about quite a bit recently has to do with the way Holy Paladins heal versus how Discipline Priests heal. This isn't a post to complain about one or the other, but possibly (hopefully) get some design insight on Holy Paladin specifically.

Holy Paladin was, to my understanding, designed to be more of "Melee healer" in Legion than it ever has been before. This is due to the removal of Denounce, the addition of their new Mastery (Mastery is what makes them heal for more due to proximity, correct?), and the fact that their mastery increases their armor by 30%.

With these things in mind, wouldn't it have made sense to redesign Holy Paladin with a "heal through damage" play style as well? I understand the desire to keep it a "niche play style" with Disc Priest, but I believe it would have been both very cool to make Holy Paladin heal through damage generated via melee and simultaneously fit the class fantasy of the heavily armored bearer of The Light. Personally, I would have been much more gungho to play my Paladin at the launch of Legion had this been the case.

Is there any chance that we might be able to get some insight on why this wasn't the determined play style for Holy Paladins in Legion?
Primarily because we don't want to force people into a playstyle (baseline, without talents) where they have to both target friendly targets to heal and enemy targets to damage, and frequently swap between them. Discipline is built very specifically for people who want that, and is good place to have it because 1) the class has Holy as an alternative and 2) Discipline has historically had a component of that, so a lot of players who want it are already there. But it's a playstyle that's both unusual and complex, and it's not likely to be baked into the core functionality of 2 out of 6 healing specs.

Beacon of the Saviour from Legion Alpha, for example, would have been an amazing addition to support the melee healer playstyle.
That was the original intent of that talent, and we know some people liked it. We didn't remove it because the concept is totally bad, but that particular design had rotational impacts we weren't happy with (it encouraged a fully all-in DPS rotation, rather than a healer playstyle that got buffs of some sort from DPS abilities). Augmenting your healing through attacks is still something there's room for on the spec when we have the right time and place for it.

In general, where healers do get healing benefits from damage abilities, we're avoiding the classic "smart heal for X% of the damage you deal." We'd rather you still do your healing primarily through making decisions about casting healing spells. That doesn't have to be a strict rule--Avenging Crusader and Way of the Crane are neat designs and could potentially be in PvE as well--but it's one thing we think about. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Warlock (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)Reap Souls
This should not affect Mythic Dungeon bosses--only the start of a raid encounter and the start of an entire Mythic Keystone dungeon. Dungeon runs themselves are meant to be a continuous challenge of combat where managing resources before/after a boss is part of the gameplay.

We're going to monitor whether Affliction needs an overall buff to account for this (even in a patch with few class changes). We still believe it's better to not have the variance between the first attempt at a boss with 12 saved souls, and all future attempts where you feel like you've lost your one chance to do your best damage. Avoiding that sort of pressure is a reason we've generally tried to become more standardized about clearing resources at the start of an encounter for all classes. If the encounter follows a consistent set of rules every time, the spec can be tuned around that behavior, including a spec that, for example, has slower rampup. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Blue Tweets

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Should players be holding on to rep tokens or rep reward bags from order hall missions for upcoming 7.2 Paragon reputation?
There's no reason to do that. Existing reputation tokens will not grant rep beyond exalted. (WarcraftDevs)

WowCraft - Episode 34: TRAMpled
Another episode of WowCraft has been released!

can i ask what is enjoyable about killing mobs that give nothing of significance in return? i mean, whats the point? why would i waste time flying out there when I can go do relevant content? not being coy just curious lol

can i ask what is enjoyable about killing mobs that give nothing of significance in return? i mean, whats the point? why would i waste time flying out there when I can go do relevant content? not being coy just curious lol

/sigh why you even play this game -_- this game is not designed for you btw

You guys remember back in vanilla when all items were static crit based? Yeah. That stuff changed for a reason. I'm surprised that cloak was even created in the first place. It goes against everything blizzard had done before.